Between 1803 and 1806, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark co-captained the most famous expedition in American history. But while Lewis ended his life just three years later, Clark, as the highest-ranking federal official in the West, spent three decades overseeing its consequences: Indian removal and the destruction of Native America. In a rare combination of storytelling and scholarship, bestselling author Landon Y. Jones vividly depicts Clark's life and the dark and bloody ground of America's early West, capturing the qualities of character and courage that made Clark an unequaled leader in America's grander enterprise: the shaping of the West.
In 1798—more than five years before he led the epic western journey that would make him and Meriwether Lewis national heroes—William Clark set off by flatboat from his Louisville, Kentucky home with a cargo of tobacco and furs to sell downriver in Spanish New Orleans. He also carried with him a leather-trimmed journal to record his travels and notes on his activities. In this vivid history, Jo Ann Trogdon reveals William Clark’s highly questionable activities during the years before his famous journey west of the Mississippi. Delving into the details of Clark’s diary and ledger entries, Trogdon investigates evidence linking Clark to a series of plots—often called the Spanish Conspiracy—in which corrupt officials sought to line their pockets with Spanish money and to separate Kentucky from the United States. The Unknown Travels and Dubious Pursuits of William Clark gives readers a more complex portrait of the American icon than has been previously written.
For three decades following the expedition with Meriwether Lewis for which he is best known, William Clark forged a meritorious public career that contributed even more to the opening of the West: from 1807 to 1838 he served as the U.S. government’s most important representative to western Indians. This biography focuses on Clark’s tenure as Indian agent, territorial governor, and Superintendent of Indian Affairs at St. Louis. Jay H. Buckley shows that Clark had immense influence on Indian-white relations in the trans-Mississippi region specifically and on federal Indian policy generally. As an agent of American expansion, Clark actively promoted the government factory system and the St. Louis fur trade and favored trade and friendship over military conflict. Clark was responsible for one-tenth of all Indian treaties ratified by the U.S. Senate. His first treaty in 1808 began Indian removal from what became Missouri Territory. His last treaty in 1836 completed the process, divesting Indians of the northwestern corner of Missouri. Although he sympathized with the Indians’ fate and felt compassion for Native peoples, Clark was ultimately responsible for dispossessing more Indians than perhaps any other American. Drawing on treaty documents and Clark’s voluminous papers, Buckley analyzes apparent contradictions in Clark’s relationship with Indians, fellow bureaucrats, and frontier entrepreneurs. He examines the choices Clark and his contemporaries made in formulating and implementing Indian policies and explores how Clark’s paternalism as a slaveholder influenced his approach to dealing with Indians. Buckley also reveals the ambiguities and cross-purposes of Clark’s policy making and his responses to such hostilities as the Black Hawk War. William Clark: Indian Diplomat is the complex story of a sometimes sentimental, yet always pragmatic, imperialist. Buckley gives us a flawed but human hero who, in the realm of Indian affairs, had few equals among American diplomats.
"There are letters concerning the establishing of the Corps of Discovery's first winter camp in December 1803, preparations for setting out into the country west of Fort Mandan in 1805, and Clark's fossil dig at Big Bone Lick, Kentucky, in 1807. There are also letters about Lewis's disturbed final days that shed light on whether he committed suicide or was murdered.
By examining the life and career of William Clark, this book explores how the North American West entered the American imagination. Clark was among the most important western officials of his generation, and he worked to represent the West during a period of tremendous uncertainty and change. Without ever calling himself a writer or an artist, Clark nonetheless drew maps, helped to produce books, drafted lengthy reports, surveyed the landscape, and wrote numerous journals that made sense of the West and its future for Americans who were fascinated by the region's potential but also fearful of its dangers. William Clark's World situates the descriptive words and pictures created by Clark and his contemporaries at the center of a discussion of western history and cultural development. The book casts new light on the familiar narrative of manifest destiny and on the nation's view of the West in the early nineteenth century. --Book Jacket.
Strange as it may seem today, William Clark—best known as the American explorer who joined Meriwether Lewis in leading an overland expedition to the Pacific—has many more claims to fame than his legendary Voyage of Discovery, dramatic and daring though that venture may have been. Although studies have been published on virtually every aspect of the Lewis and Clark journey, Wilderness Journey is the first comprehensive account of Clark’s lengthy and multifaceted life. Following Lewis and Clark’s great odyssey, Clark’s service as a soldier, Indian diplomat, and government official placed him at center stage in the national quest to possess and occupy North America’s vast western hinterland and prefigured U.S. policies in the region. In his personal life, Clark had to overcome challenges no less daunting than those he faced in the public arena. Foley pays careful attention to the family and business dimensions of Clark’s private world, adding richness to this well-rounded and revealing portrait of the man and his courageous life. Coinciding with the bicentennial in 2004 of the departure of Lewis and Clark’s famed Corps of Discovery, Wilderness Journey fills a major gap in scholarship. Intended for the general reader, as well as for specialists in the field, this fascinating book provides a well-balanced and thorough account of one of America’s most significant frontiersmen.
This classic look at the basics of firefighting provides up-to-date information on firefighting operations beginning with fire behavior and on through to fundamental approaches, strategy, coordination, and tactics of safe fireground activities. The book also discusses operational procedures of ladder and engine companies, along with preplanning routines that departments should follow, and finishes with a look at common fires, along with fires that could require special attention, including the “Big One.”
Tracing the transformation of early modern academics into modern researchers from the Renaissance to Romanticism, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University uses the history of the university and reframes the "Protestant Ethic" to reconsider the conditions of knowledge production in the modern world. William Clark argues that the research university—which originated in German Protestant lands and spread globally in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—developed in response to market forces and bureaucracy, producing a new kind of academic whose goal was to establish originality and achieve fame through publication. With an astonishing wealth of research, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University investigates the origins and evolving fixtures of academic life: the lecture catalogue, the library catalog, the grading system, the conduct of oral and written exams, the roles of conversation and the writing of research papers in seminars, the writing and oral defense of the doctoral dissertation, the ethos of "lecturing with applause" and "publish or perish," and the role of reviews and rumor. This is a grand, ambitious book that should be required reading for every academic.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Janet Maslin, The New York Times • St. Louis Post-Dispatch When Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Bill Dedman noticed in 2009 a grand home for sale, unoccupied for nearly sixty years, he stumbled through a surprising portal into American history. Empty Mansions is a rich mystery of wealth and loss, connecting the Gilded Age opulence of the nineteenth century with a twenty-first-century battle over a $300 million inheritance. At its heart is a reclusive heiress named Huguette Clark, a woman so secretive that, at the time of her death at age 104, no new photograph of her had been seen in decades. Though she owned palatial homes in California, New York, and Connecticut, why had she lived for twenty years in a simple hospital room, despite being in excellent health? Why were her valuables being sold off? Was she in control of her fortune, or controlled by those managing her money? Dedman has collaborated with Huguette Clark’s cousin, Paul Clark Newell, Jr., one of the few relatives to have frequent conversations with her. Dedman and Newell tell a fairy tale in reverse: the bright, talented daughter, born into a family of extreme wealth and privilege, who secrets herself away from the outside world. Huguette was the daughter of self-made copper industrialist W. A. Clark, nearly as rich as Rockefeller in his day, a controversial senator, railroad builder, and founder of Las Vegas. She grew up in the largest house in New York City, a remarkable dwelling with 121 rooms for a family of four. She owned paintings by Degas and Renoir, a world-renowned Stradivarius violin, a vast collection of antique dolls. But wanting more than treasures, she devoted her wealth to buying gifts for friends and strangers alike, to quietly pursuing her own work as an artist, and to guarding the privacy she valued above all else. The Clark family story spans nearly all of American history in three generations, from a log cabin in Pennsylvania to mining camps in the Montana gold rush, from backdoor politics in Washington to a distress call from an elegant Fifth Avenue apartment. The same Huguette who was touched by the terror attacks of 9/11 held a ticket nine decades earlier for a first-class stateroom on the second voyage of the Titanic. Empty Mansions reveals a complex portrait of the mysterious Huguette and her intimate circle. We meet her extravagant father, her publicity-shy mother, her star-crossed sister, her French boyfriend, her nurse who received more than $30 million in gifts, and the relatives fighting to inherit Huguette’s copper fortune. Richly illustrated with more than seventy photographs, Empty Mansions is an enthralling story of an eccentric of the highest order, a last jewel of the Gilded Age who lived life on her own terms. Praise for Empty Mansions “An amazing story of profligate wealth . . . an outsized tale of rags-to-riches prosperity.”—The New York Times “An evocative and rollicking read, part social history, part hothouse mystery, part grand guignol.”—The Daily Beast “Fascinating . . . [a] haunting true-life tale.”—People “One of those incredible stories that you didn’t even know existed. It filled a void.”—Jon Stewart, The Daily Show “Thrilling . . . deliciously scandalous.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
The journals of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark remain the single most important document in the history of American exploration. Through these tales of adventure, edited and annotated by American Book Award nominee Landon Jones, we meet Indian peoples and see the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, and western rivers the way Lewis and Clark first observed them -- majestic, pristine, uncharted, and awe-inspiring.
